A few "paperweights" listed at the bottom of that link although, as always, the quality of the reports on a site like that is dependent on the people making the reports.

@Xraynorm, this won't tell you whether the printer actually works with the bundled driver, but you can see whether the driver for a printer you have your eye on is included with Ubuntu/Mint. Open the "Printing" Utility > click on "Add" > highlight "Other" and type "http://" (no quotes) in the device URI field. Click on forward, choose HP and a full list of supported models will appear. (Or wait a minute or so after the add window opens until "LPT #1" and/or "Serial Port #1" and/or whatever ports you have appear, select one of them, click on forward and go straight to the printer list.)

Nerdy-ish wrote:I am interested in a colour laser printer as well. Does the fact that you can have a network connection more or less guarantee it will work under Linux, and not end up with a Windows GDI printer?

It suspect it depends on two things: the maker and what you send to it; AFAIK HP have always used their own control language and, as they actively support Linux drivers, there should not be any problems though there is a known problem with DCHP which makes having a static IP for a network printer more reliable.

Nerdy-ish wrote:I've had it up to hear with USB and it's problems, especially hogging CPU resources until a taxk finishes.

Thiat could be because it is one of those printers that relies on the computer to do the work rather than having its own software to do things. Altrnatively, if you have a CMYK printer and you send it CMYk, you don't have the overhead of converting it to whatever standard the printer supports when it is different from the standard you have used when you sent it.

I have an HP wireless printer, Photosmart eA10, not quite the same as a network printer, as it does not have a network cable socket, but nevertheless it works superbly for all computers on the network, whether they are connected by wireless or cable to the router.

Using the router web browser setup page I have set a network Reserved Address for the printer to ensure that it stays at the same local IP of 192.168.0.7. This should remove the possibility of the printer not being found after a router reboot.

It needed an update of hplip from the HP site to get it to work on my Ubuntu 10.04, but worked out of the box on Ubuntu 11.04. The hplip toolbox is a terrific utility, better than any other linux printer facility I have found; better even than many windows print utilities.

For colour laser printing I started with a Konica-Minolta 2300 then purchased a 2400 when the 2300 ran out of toner. That's the economics of it. It was cheaper to get a new printer on sale than to refill the toner cartridges.

Neither printer was supposed to work with Linux but both did courtesy of a driver on SourceForge. I was even able to compile it for 64bits.

Nowadays Konica-Minolta are apparently putting a little more effort into Linux.

Currently I'm using an HP CP1215 which is listed as supported. It works as well as the others did.

I also still use an old Samsung ML-1210 monochrome laser which continues to work well. Samsung was advertising Linux compatibility back in 2002 when I got it.

Bottom line is a printer is more likely to work under Linux than under Windows these days because manufacturers don't update older drivers to work with new versions of Windows.

Most major manufacturers now support Linux, with some notable exceptions (Canon and Brother, mainly).

Actually, Brother has excellent Linux driver support for most of its printer range. I've had the pleasure of using a number of models (both inkjet and laser) in the work environment. (I have also just bought myself a small office scanner/mono A4 laser printer (DCP-7055) with no issues.

RE ... there is a known problem with DCHP which makes having a static IP for a network printer more reliable.
...

Generally DHCP can be configured to hand out the same IP address to a given network device (eg printer or printer server) by allocating an IP address to that network device's MAC address. You get the network device MAC address (for a printer or print server, print the configuration page). Configure the device to receive a DHCP address. Then configure the DHCP server to serve that MAC address with a particular e.g. fixed IP address. Do that part in your DHCP server, e.g. your router's DHCP configuration panel or in your PC DHCP server.